All that oxygen you enjoy breathing doesn’t just appear magically in the atmosphere. Earth is livable because plants around the globe pump out oxygen as a byproduct of photosynthesis, and some of them become tasty food crops in addition. However, photosynthesis isn’t perfect despite many eons of evolutionary refinement.

While there are hopes of one day channeling photosynthetic outputs directly to our needs, many key details of the process, including the actual efficiency, are still incompletely known. Researchers at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have just received a big grant to map the molecular events that take place inside one the most complex biological machines known to man — a group of electron-shuffling proteins known as photosystem II.

Everyone dreams about what living on some distant celestial body would be like. The human race has only ever stepped foot on our moon, though, and it’s not a habitable environment. However, NASA is looking to change that, starting with growing plants on the lunar surface.

If you don’t have a backyard — or have one that doesn’t get enough light — it might be too much of a hassle to fit caring for some plants into your daily routine. Sure, plants just sit around not causing too much trouble, but you still have to maneuver them into the sunlight along with watering them, and if you have a limited availability of windows that face natural light, it can become tedious to play musical windows all day. A new project out of Rutgers University aims to put plants into their own exoskeletons that can autonomously chase the sunlight around, making your day a little less tedious.

As time moves on and technology advances, we’re not only using finite resources to power our daily lives, but we’re adding new and powerful devices to our routines. Those new and powerful devices soak up more power than zero devices would, and our main sources of energy are finite to begin with, so at some point we’ll need a new reliable source. Now, a team of researchers has figured out a way to extract significant amounts of hydrogen from any plant, setting up a new source of environmentally friendly energy.

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